Search results for: "The Mind"

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  2. Skillful Fears
     … being harmful, and the mind states that would make you act on the desire to be harmful. This is one of the reasons why we meditate: to find something really solid inside that’s not threatened by anything outside at all. Because it’s usually through weakness that we tend to do unskillful things. So the mind needs to be strengthened, and there are … 
  3. Pride in Your Craft
     … The mind that’s still is the mind that can see clearly what’s working and what’s not. And it has a clear idea of what it means to “work” because you’re getting more and more sensitive to the movements of the mind and also to the different levels of stress in the mind. You begin to see that there are fluctuations … 
  4. Remembering Ajaan Lee
     … There are two other qualities that need to be brought together with the mindfulness to make it do its work. One is alertness, when you’re actually watching what you’re doing, and you keep referring back to the mind. You look at the breath, say, but you’re also keeping track of the mind. How is the mind staying with the breath? The … 
  5. Stop Squirming
     … But fortunately, that’s not the stress or suffering that weighs the mind down. If it were, there wouldn’t be anything you could do about it. What really weighs the mind down is the stress of the four noble truths: the stress that comes from craving and ignorance. And that’s a cause you can do something about. You can replace ignorance with … 
  6. In the Present
     … He says, one, you clearly see what’s happening, particularly in the mind. That’s where you want to focus. And then two, you do your duty with regard to what’s coming up in the mind. So there’s something you actually do. And when the Buddha talks about being in the present, it’s always in the context of heedfulness: If you … 
  7. Delight in Persistence
     … So we’re developing a strength of the mind here, the strength of persistence. We find that we’re learning things that may seem little to begin with, minor minutia, but they open up a lot of bigger issues in the mind. After all, your relationship to pain is something that’s been murky for a long time. You first encountered pain when? In … 
  8. Effortlessness Through Effort
     … It becomes automatic because you’ve gone through all the problems, and you’ve gotten really good at solving the problems that the mind keeps churning out. You see why the mind goes for particular thoughts—and the insight has to go into the particulars. You can’t just say, “I’m attracted to this thought because of greed, or because of anger, or … 
  9. Skills to Make You Free
     … These attitudes enlarge the mind. The next two skills are that you train yourself in virtue and train yourself in discernment: your ability to see what’s going on in the mind, what choices you’re making, which ones are skillful, which ones are not. The final two skills are the ability not to let the mind be overcome by pain and not to … 
  10. Goodwill All Around
     … And then train the mind so it’s more and more careful all the time, more mindful all the time. This is why we use the breath or use the word buddho , or 32 parts of the body, whatever object we find is easy to keep in mind as a way of getting the mind to settle down. Once the mind settles down, it … 
  11. Encouragement
     … Without this basic skill, all the understanding you might have about the mind, your psychology, the Buddha’s teachings, is all just concepts. You can reason about it and you can argue about it, but it doesn’t really accomplish the purpose of the Buddha’s teachings, which is to get the mind beyond suffering. And in the course of gaining release from suffering … 
  12. How the Breath Helps You to Die Well
     … How you perceive the breath, how you perceive the mind, how you perceive the things that are coming in to disturb you will have a huge impact on where your mind goes: where it goes while you’re meditating and also where it goes when you leave the body. So you want to be sensitive to the way the mind creates pictures to represent … 
  13. Heedfulness
     … Even as you try to get the mind as still as possible, there are different things happening with the breath, different things happening in the mind that you have to get sensitive to first, and then you calm them down. In doing that, you learn two lessons: One, the Buddha was right—this state of concentration is one of the best things that you … 
  14. The Power of Present Karma
     … So, what are you putting in? Try to put in the intention to understand the mind, to understand its actions. The best way to do that is to get the mind still, so that it can watch and see what you can make out of the potentials that are here. There’s that passage where the Buddha talks about the potentials for the different … 
  15. A Good-natured Attitude
     … This is where the mind becomes really one. And you didn’t have to think about when you were going to stop evaluating the breath, it just seemed like the right thing to do. This comes from learning to listen both to the body and to the mind. That pulley that Ajaan Lee talks about as checking the mind, checking the body, now doesn … 
  16. All-around Alertness
     … Then, from the sense of well-being in the body, it begins to spread into the mind. Partly because the mind likes being with comfortable sensations, and partly because you realize you’re developing a skill. That’s part of the sense of well-being, part of the pleasure that comes with the meditation. As you’re learning how to figure out your own … 
  17. Tranquility & Insight Together
     … Stillness is getting the mind to settle down, to be at home here in the present moment with a sense of ease and well-being. As the Buddha says, when you settle down, you want to indulge in that sense of well-being, because the mind has a tendency to wander off in search of pleasure in other places. So you’ve got to … 
  18. Samsara
     … The mental label you keep repeating—“Keep the mind on the breath, mind on the breath, mind on the breath, breath, breath”: Take that faculty of the mind that’s always labeling things and learn to use it skillfully. Label things that allow the mind to settle down. Once the mind has settled down, then you use the perception of inconstancy or impermanence, the … 
  19. Unskillful Habits
     … As you stay here, you get to see a lot of things going on in the mind, a lot of things going on in the body. Yet, while you’re with both the mind and the body, you’re able to step back from both a bit. You can sense the mind as you get grounded in the breath. You get out of your … 
  20. Strength in Humor
    One of the reasons we meditate is because we have to strengthen the mind. If we don’t strengthen the mind, it gets wounded—and not just wounded. When it’s wounded by the pains of aging, illness, death, separation, meeting up with things we don’t like, being separated from things and people we do like, then we end up doing really harmful … 
  21. The Origination of Suffering
     … In other words, any thought world that would arise in the mind right now that has nothing to do with the breath, nothing to do with the mind focused on the breath—you’ve got to let it go. This is going to be good practice, because when you die, that’s what’s going to happen. A thought world will appear, and at … 
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